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The Cat Goes Souling

The Hallowed Days

Halloween is one of the very oldest holidays, tracing its origins back thousands of years. The holiday we know as Halloween has had a multitude of influences from many cultures. The ultimate origins come from the ancient Celtic harvest festival, Samhain, a time when people believed that the spirits of the dead roamed the earth. The Samhain festival usually lasted three days and many people would parade in costumes made from animal skins.

When the Romans invaded Britain in the first century, Pomona Day, named for the goddess of fruits and gardens, was celebrated around November 1st. With the spread of Christianity, November 1st was named All Saints' Day. November 2nd, All Souls' Day, honoured the day with bonfires, parades and people dressing in costumes as saints, angels and devils.

The Halloween that is celebrated today is a combination of all of these influences: Pomona Day's apples, nuts and harvest treats; Samhain's black cats, magic, evil spirits and death; and the ghosts, skeletons and skulls from All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.

All Hallows e'en, or eve, a night of pranks and fun, was celebrated with many wholesome games. Young people, for example, read future events from the way roasting chestnuts sputtered and jumped next to the red-hot coals. They bobbed for apples and flung snakelike apple parings behind themselves, to learn the initials of future mates. Our British ancestors brought these old folk practices to the New World, where generations of adolescents have observed them on the night that witches traditionally ride broomsticks and hobgoblins venture abroad.

The original "jack-o-lanterns" were carved by the Celts out of big turnips. When the early settlers came to America, they found that the pumpkin was larger and more colourful than the turnip. It soon replace the turnip as the jack-o-lantern and became the most widely recognized symbol of Halloween.

On Halloween night, the children of the neighbourhood come trick-or-treating. This practice goes back to the early celebration of All Souls' Day. The poor would go begging and the homeowners would give them a special treat, a soul cake. Soul cakes were of different kinds. Some cakes were flat and oval. Others were plump and bunlike. There was a spice-sweetened variety, and the sort that resembled a small fruit cake. All were rich with milk and eggs.

Soul cakes and souling customs vary from county to county, but souling practices always flourished best along the Welsh border. Even there, the custom is rapidly dying out. In hamlets of Shropshire and Cheshire, in parts of the Midlands, and Lancashire one sometimes hears the soulers chanting old rhymes such as:

Soul! Soul! for an apple or two!
If you have no apples, pears will do.
If you have no pears, money will do.
If you have no money, God bless you!

Sent to TCM by Hart Dowd

Learn more about the history of Halloween here.

"A soul cake, a soul cake, pray good missus a soul cake..."

Soul Cakes of various sorts are found throughout European traditions. They were left out for wandering souls, or placed on their graves on All Hallow's Day/All Souls' Eve [that's November 1st, the evening before November 2nd, which was All Souls Day]; or given to beggars or the poor in lieu of the dead. It was said by some that for every cake given away and eaten, a soul was released from purgatory. The children's custom of going from door to door a-souling, singing the above mentioned chant, asking for soul cakes, can be seen to be behind the Halloween custom of "Trick-or-Treating". Behind all of this, of course are ancient Pagan customs associated with Samhain, the Celtic New Year holiday on October 31st [it's pronounced "sow-in" rhyming with "now")].

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale in colour and fluffy in texture. Beat in the egg yolks. Fold in the sifted flour and spices. Stir in the currants. Add enough milk to make a soft dough. Form into flat cakes and mark each top with a cross. Bake on a well-greased baking tray in a hot oven until golden.

Reprinted from Sound & Spirit

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After the Romans invaded Britain in the first century A.D., they merged their Pomona Day festival, also celebrated on Nov. 1 and dedicated to their goddess of fruits and gardens, with the Celtic holiday. The Romans were said to have substituted the sacrifice of humans with burning effigies, a custom that was transferred to England’s Guy Fawkes Day after the notorious attempt to blow up parliament in 1605.

                                         www.sacred-texts.com

It was intended to be the beginning of a great uprising of English Catholics, who were distressed by the increased severity of penal laws against the practice of their religion. The conspirators, who began plotting early in 1604, expanded their number to a point where secrecy was impossible.

The group included Robert Catesby, John Wright, and Thomas Winter, the originators, Christopher Wright, Robert Winter, Robert Keyes, Guy Fawkes, a soldier who had been serving in Flanders, Thomas Percy, John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, Ambrose Rookwood, and Thomas Bates.

Percy hired a cellar under the House of Lords, in which 36 barrels of gunpowder, overlaid with iron bars and firewood, were secretly stored. The conspiracy was brought to light through a mysterious letter received by Lord Monteagle, a brother-in-law of Tresham, on October 26, urging him not to attend Parliament on the opening day.

The 1st earl of Salisbury and others, to whom the plot was made known, took steps leading to the discovery of the materials and the arrest of Fawkes....

Read the rest of the article.

This is an ancient festivity that has been much transformed through the years, but which was intended in prehispanic Mexico to celebrate children and the dead. Hence, the best way to describe this Mexican holiday is to say that it is a time when Mexican families remember their dead, and the continuity of life.

The original celebration can be traced to many Mesoamerican native traditions, such as the festivities held during the Aztec month of Miccailhuitontli, ritually presided by the "Lady of the Dead" (Mictecacihuatl), and dedicated to children and the dead. In the Aztec calendar, this ritual fell roughly at the end of the Gregorian month of July and the beginning of August, but in the postconquest era it was moved by Spanish priests so that it coincided with the Christian holiday of All Hallows Eve (in Spanish: "Día de Todos Santos.") This was a vain effort to transform the observance from a profane to a Christian celebration. The result is that Mexicans now celebrate the day of the dead during the first two days of November, rather than at the beginning of summer. But remember the dead they still do, and the modern festivity is characterized by the traditional Mexican blend of ancient aboriginal and introduced Christian features.

Generalizing broadly, the holiday's activities consist of families (1) welcoming their dead back into their homes, and (2) visiting the graves of their close kin. At the cemetery, family members engage in sprucing up the gravesite, decorating it with flowers, setting out and enjoying a picnic, and interacting socially with other family and community members who gather there. In both cases, celebrants believe that the souls of the dead return and are all around them. Families remember the departed by telling stories about them. The meals prepared for these picnics are sumptuous, usually featuring meat dishes in spicy sauces, chocolate beverages, cookies, sugary confections in a variety of animal or skull shapes, and a special egg-batter bread ("pan de muerto," or bread of the dead). Gravesites and family altars are profusely decorated with flowers (primarily large, bright flowers such as marigolds and chrysanthemums), and adorned with religious amulets and with offerings of food, cigarettes and alcoholic beverages. Because of this warm social environment, the colorful setting, and the abundance of food, drink and good company, this commemoration of the dead has pleasant overtones for the observers, in spite of the open fatalism exhibited by all participants, whose festive interaction with both the living and the dead in an important social ritual is a way of recognizing the cycle of life and death that is human existence.

In homes observant families create an altar and decorate it with items that they believe are beautiful and attractive to the souls of their departed ones. Such items include offerings of flowers and food, but also things that will remind the living of the departed (such as their photographs, a diploma, or an article of clothing), and the things that the dead prized and enjoyed while they lived. This is done to entice the dead and assure that their souls actually return to take part in the remembrance. In very traditional settings, typically found only in native communities, the path from the street to the altar is actually strewn with petals to guide the returning soul to its altar and the bosom of the family.The traditional observance calls for departed children to be remembered during the first day of the festivity (the Day of the Little Angels, "Día de los Angelitos"), and for adults to be remembered on the second day. Traditionally, this s accompanied by a feast during the early morning hours of November the 2nd, the Day of the Dead proper, though modern urban Mexican families usually observe the Day of the Dead with only a special family supper featuring the bread of the dead. In southern Mexico, for example in the city of Puebla, it is good luck to be the one who bites into the plastic toy skeleton hidden by the baker in each rounded loaf. Friends and family members give one another gifts consisting of sugar skeletons or other items with a death motif, and the gift is more prized if the skull or skeleton is embossed with one's own name. Another variation found in the state of Oaxaca is for bread to be molded into the shape of a body or burial wrap, and for a face to be embedded on one end of the loaf. During the days leading up to and following the festivity, some bakeries in heavily aboriginal communities cease producing the wide range of breads that they typically sell so that they can focus on satisfying the demand for bread of the dead.

Reprinted from http://www.public.iastate.edu/

Learn more here.

In Mexico, October 31st, November 1st and 2nd [i.e. Hallowe'en, All Saints' and All Souls' Days] are celebrated as Días de los Muertos, the Days of the Dead. Families come together; they set up special altars or ofrendas, with flowers, candles, lights, food and pictures of their "dearly departed ones," who are welcomed home for a visit. They make special food, and often visit the graves of their ancestors for a picnic. Various regions of Mexico have different types of bread, Pan de Muerto, are baked, place on the ofrendas, and eaten in celebration. The following recipe is the type of bread made and shaped in and around Mexico City. It is a sweet, fragrant egg bread, shaped in large rounds topped with a "skull" and crossed "bones". Warning: As a yeast bread, Pan de Muerto takes between six and seven hours to make (this includes the five hours alotted for three risings and the baking as well as the mixing, shaping and glazing.) It is possible to refrigerate the sponge, or the dough at points in the process, so to spread it out over a few days. But know that this is a complex, time-consuming project. It could be worth it once a year though, no?

The Sponge

Ingredients

1 and 1/4 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup sugar
2 cakes yeast or 1 and 1/2 tablespoons dry yeast
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoons warm (NOT hot) water
3 large eggs (room temperature), slightly beaten
4 scant cups unbleached flour (plus extra for working the dough)
An extra large mixing bowl, vegetable oil, waxed paper or plastic wrap, and a clean dish towel

Method

Warm your oven at lowest possible setting; turn it off after it is just warm (about 70 degrees). Dissolve yeast in the warm water in an extra large mixing bowl. Add sugar, salt and eggs, mix thoroughly. Gradually add the flour and mix to form a sticky, stretchy dough (it takes up to five minutes). Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, scrape the bowl, flour your hands and work it into a rounded ball. Lightly oil the mixing bowl; put the dough in, turn it over immediately; cover the dough with oiled waxed paper or plastic wrap and cover it with the clean dish towel; place in the warm oven (turned off by now) to rise. Let it rise until it doubles its size; this takes about two hours. "Punch" it down, and prepare to incorporate it into the dough. Note: This "sponge" can be refrigerated, or even frozen, at this point; if you do this, be sure to remove it from the cold and allow it to return to room temperature before you continue (Please don't try to heat or microwave it, for that would kill the yeast!!)

The Dough

Ingredients
1 cup sugar
2 sticks butter, softened
The sponge (see above) pulled apart into little pieces
4 egg yolks (some recipes call for 8-15 egg yolks) lightly beaten
with 2 tablespoons warm water
4 scant cups unbleached flour (plus extra for working the dough)
1/4 cup water
flavorings: either 1 teaspoon orange blossom (Neroli) water and/or the grated rind of 1 orange; OR 1 teaspoon anise extract and/or 1 tablespoon aniseed; OR some combination of the above ingredients. Some recipes even call for chopped-up bits of dried and/or candied fruits, figs, raisins, pineapple, citron, pumpkin...Use your imagination.

Method

Mix the sugar and butter; add the pieces of the sponge and mix well. Gradually add the flour and the egg yolks (alternate 1/3 flour, 1/2 egg...finish off with flour.) Beat in the water and the flavorings. It should form a smooth, slightly sticky dough. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, scrape the bowl, flour your hands and work it into a rounded ball. Lightly oil the mixing bowl; put the dough in, turn it over immediately; cover the dough with oiled waxed paper or plastic wrap and cover it with the clean dish towel (Note: One can refrigerate the dough at this point and finish it off the next day. If so, allow it to return to room temperature before continuing); place in the warm oven (about 70 degrees) to rise. Let it rise until it almost doubles its size; it takes about one-and-a-half hours this time.

Grease two large cookie sheets. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface (poke it first and watch it shrink!), knead it a little bit, divide in two and return one half to the bowl. Each half will be shaped into one large loaf. To form the loaves, take the first lump of dough, pinch off 1/4 of it and lay it aside. With greased or floured hands, pat the 3/4 dough left into a smooth round ball. Flatten it a bit on the counter till it's about 1 inch thick and 8 inches in diameter. Press the edges down to give it a sort of rim; let it bulge up a little in the middle. Place this shaped loaf on one of the greased cookie sheets. Take the 1/4 dough you put aside and divide it into 4 pieces; Roll one of the pieces into a ball and roll the other three out into long strips. Form the 3 strips into "bones" with bumps on the ends, and the round ball into a "skull" with holes for eyes, nose and mouth. Place these on the greased sheet with the loaf; cover gently with oiled waxed paper or plastic wrap and cover it with the clean dish towel; and let rise in warm oven (about 70 deg. again) for one hour. Do just the same with the other half of the dough you put back in the bowl.

The Glaze

Ingredients
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup granulated sugar

Method

Remove the loaves and "bones" from the oven and then heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Remove the cloth and waxed paper or plastic wrap from the risen dough. Carefully stretch the "bones" over the top of the loaf forming 3 crossed-bones. Gently press the "skull" on top (you may wish to pinch and poke it a little to make it look more like a skull beforehand.) Brush the entire loaf with some of the beaten egg mix. Do just the same with the other loaf. Bake until the loaves are golden brown (and spring back firmly when touched (carefully) - between 15 to 25 minutes. Turn off the oven, open the door and let the bread set in the oven for 5-6 minutes. Remove from the oven; brush with melted butter; remove to baking racks and sprinkle generously with sugar. Allow to cool completely before storing in paper or plastic bags.

Alternate Method: The dough may be shaped into smaller loaves; or into the shapes of people or animals. If smaller loaves or figures are formed, the baking temperature should be raised from 375 degrees to just below 400, and one should check to see if they are done sooner rather than later.

Reprinted from Sound & Spirit

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